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18 September 2006

uncanny

So today was space day in my seminar, and it started with an email from a student in class asking that I sit in a different spot at the table. The room is in fact pretty small, and I do recall last time having to crane to see certain people in it, and so I happily obliged. I hope that went better.

But what I really signed on to write about is the uncanny post over at Working Blue in which Jenny Edbauer writes about actor network theory. In response to today's reading, which, among other things, included Lefebvre, a piece on Lefebvre by Ackerman, and also Edbauer on rhetorical ecologies, one STS/Latour/rhetoric person in our class actually called this new affinity by suggesting that Latour's notion of actant seems important for what Edbauer is doing with ecologies (which, by the way, we all really grooved on, especially the business about 'verbing' rhetoric). IOW, the rhetorical situation needs to be thingified even more, or to account for what Jane Bennett calls "thing power."

There were more affinities to be sure--like the specific analysis Edbauer offers along with Elizabeth Grosz's meditation on bodies-cities, but because I need to eat in order to make it in time to tonight's new materialisms group, where we're talking about some really great stuff (courtesy of Jane Bennett and Brian Massumi), I'll just settle for pointing out the uncanniness of that affinity detection and say rock on, Edbauer.

Comments

So today was space day in my seminar, and it started with an email from a student in class asking that I sit in a different spot at the table. The room is in fact pretty small, and I do recall last time having to crane to see certain people in it, and so I happily obliged. I hope that went better.

But what I really signed on to write about is the uncanny post over at Working Blue in which Jenny Edbauer writes about actor network theory. In response to today's reading, which, among other things, included Lefebvre, a piece on Lefebvre by Ackerman, and also Edbauer on rhetorical ecologies, one STS/Latour/rhetoric person in our class actually called this new affinity by suggesting that Latour's notion of actant seems important for what Edbauer is doing with ecologies (which, by the way, we all really grooved on, especially the business about 'verbing' rhetoric). IOW, the rhetorical situation needs to be thingified even more, or to account for what Jane Bennett calls "thing power."

There were more affinities to be sure--like the specific analysis Edbauer offers along with Elizabeth Grosz's meditation on bodies-cities, but because I need to eat in order to make it in time to tonight's new materialisms group, where we're talking about some really great stuff (courtesy of Jane Bennett and Brian Massumi), I'll just settle for pointing out the uncanniness of that affinity detection and say rock on, Edbauer.